Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 937: Tom Update, Conceal Carry Renewal

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Tom is in the hospital this week so I give an update on his condition. I also tell a story about my conceal carry renewal class that Tom and I had signed up for.

This episode of Cognitive Dissinance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Gloria Hull Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissanance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes a news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome at. Also, as you can tell, there is no Tom in the studio. So, a quick update on Tom.

Last Tuesday, I got a message from Tom and said he was taking an ambulance to the hospital. And he has been in the hospital ever since and probably will be there for most of this upcoming week. So he had a massive flare-up with his back. I don't know, just so people understand in the late 20 teens, I think it was 2019, although I can't remember exactly when he got back surgery, but he had a back problem for a very long time. He wound up getting back surgery, and that fixed the problem. They had to sort of make his spine fit in his vertebrae better,

And so they did, and they, you know, he got better, wound up obviously having a very active lifestyle afterwards. So everything was cool. Last year, if people remember, he had a problem with his neck. And so his neck had a issue, similar issue that happened to him. And he had to get his neck fixed. Then he had a bad flare up this last week. And it was so bad he was having a hard time even standing because it was so painful. He couldn't even stand up.

So they called an ambulance, brought him to the hospital. and then they've been sort of dealing with that and other issues for the last week. So he's been on the hospital since. And obviously we won't have a show if Tom isn't here. I was thinking about trying to get a guest, but many people are out of town. There's a conference going on in Ontario this week and other people are busy, you know, picking up the slack for those shows. So I just don't have a guest this week.

I would normally try to set something up. If Tom won't be back next week, I should have a show something. I'll try to plan something, try to have a guest of something. kind to come on the show and talk for a little while and have a show that's actually ready to go out. This week, it was just impossible. I wasn't sure it was happening with Tom and I visited him to see how he's doing. He is in good spirits. He's hoping that all this stuff is going to be resolved later this week and he'll be able to at least be free from some of the pain that he's in because he's in an immense amount of pain. If anybody knows, Tom, you know, this is the kind of guy

who gets him punched in the face and be like, hey, did you? mean to punch me instead of, you know, reacting in a different way. And it's just, he's, he's obviously in an immense amount of pain. And when I visited him in the hospital, he was, he was definitely hurting quite a bit to the point where he could barely, you know, turn over in the bed. So he's hopefully going to have a, the doctors will work on his back to make it so that his pain has gone away and he'll be able to, like, move around again, which would be amazing for him, I know sitting still for him is just a bear. So if you have any message you want to send to Tom,

he will be reading our email. So if you want to send him a get-well message, I'm sure he would appreciate it. You could send it to dissonance. dot podcast at gmail.com. Tom still has access to his phone and is still functional in the sense that he's reading emails and stuff.

So if you have something you want to say to him, if you want to give him some good wishes and send him a nice message, I'm sure he would very much appreciate that. If there's people who post on social media or whatever, if they post on our thing, I'll try to forward those things to him. But obviously, the best and easiest way to get in touch with him

or to send him a message would be through our email account, dissonance.podcast at gmail.com. All those will come to his inbox and he'll be able to see. And I'm sure he would thank you if you sent him a nice encouraging message while he's laid up in the hospital and has been and will be for over a week. which has got to be absolutely awful. So I also wanted to tell a quick story today.

I know it's not going to be a full episode. And I'm by myself. And normally I would tell a story to Tom if he was sitting here. But I have this story I want to tell specifically because of something Tom and I, a story Tom and I told in the past. So years ago, Tom and I took a concealed carry class. We wound up taking it. And if you're unfamiliar, I'll briefly explain what happened.

happened. Tom and I decided to take a concealed carry class, and if you're unfamiliar from another country and you don't know what this is, concealed carry means that in our state of Illinois, if I want to hide a gun on my body and keep that gun hidden, but have it on my body and travel to around in public, I need a specific license to do that. Now, there's some states in the United States that don't require that license at all. They don't need anything from you. You can just if you're old enough to buy a gun, you can just buy the gun, and then you can just conceal it. And there's other places in the United States where you don't even have to conceal it. You can just wear it on the outside of your person.

You could just have a holster or whatever. And that's perfectly fine in those places. Illinois is a pretty strict state when it comes to concealed carry. And so you have to take a full class. A 16-hour class, and then you have to do a test. Don't get too far ahead of yourself. there's no written test. They do tell you a bunch of rules in the test,

but you don't technically even have to listen because there's no real written test after it's all over. They don't do an oral test or anything like that. They just tell you kind of the rules around how you're supposed to carry the gun and the situations in which you may or may not use it. And then where you shouldn't, shouldn't go.

And then at the end, the test is a shooting test. So they just want to see that you can shoot something at five, seven, and ten yards. It's literally, for the first two, if you miss the target at that range, you probably shouldn't have a gun anyway. Shooting it at 30 feet or 10 yards is also not very difficult. You should be able to hit center mass on any pistol if you practiced at all.

It's really simple. But that's the extent of the test. So Tom and I, we got these when I was, when we were down and had the studio in Chicago, we got concealed carry. We weren't sure we were going to use it. We actually never did. We've never carried pistols on our body at all. There was, in some ways, it was kind of like an experiment to see sort of how difficult the process is.

And it turns out that the process isn't difficult at all. It's literally just sitting in a room, listening to a guy talk, and then you shoot something 30 times. So it's nothing at all. The class itself was very comical. There's a whole episode in our back catalog that describes the process and what we went through. And you can go find that in the, the back catalog, if you're interested in the backstory of why we have concealed carry weapons and why we have concealed carry permits, even though neither of us concealed carry weapons at all.

Well, the state of Illinois requires you to re-up this every five years. So every five years, we have to go to a class, a three-hour class, a three-hour refresher class. And the refresher class literally just talks about what the law is, has anything changed? And it's two hours of that. and you just have to shoot the target again. That's the entire class. The first time we took the class, the original class, the instructor was crazy. He was talking about how there was perpetrators

and, you know, he was talking about all the ways in which you can shoot somebody and get away with it. It was insane. The second time we took the class, we took it with a fella that lives out in the suburbs. And he brought us into his house and he had TV trays and we watched his presentation. I think it was on a tube.

TV even. It was plugged into there. And we watched his presentation and he talked to it and we went to the range and shot. And he seemed much more darned to earth than the other instructor we had. It was relatively essentially just saying, if there's a problem, you should run away from it as best you can. Don't try to fight somebody. Don't get into a fight with people. Don't instigate issues. You're not a tough guy. Nobody's a superhuman. You don't want to get shot. You don't want to shoot anybody. It was actually pretty refreshing to hear somebody who was basically saying, This is literally a thing of last resort. If you have to carry a gun, you should,

but don't, don't, like, murder somebody for no reason or get into fights for no reason. You would think that would be common sense, but, hey, you know, gun culture is gun culture in the United States. So I wind up a couple weeks ago, my concealed carry is going to expire. So this would be 10 years I will have had a concealed carry permit.

And I reached out to Tom, who's also going to be expiring, expiring, and this was a couple weeks ago, and I said, hey, do you want to sign up for a class together? We'll go together, and then we can finish it together, and then just shoot, and then maybe we could go out to lunch afterwards. And he was cool with it. We signed up for it. And there's a local gun range that I signed up for. And they had teach classes there. So we decided to do it. And obviously, Tom goes into the hospital on Tuesday, right? So he's out. And he was initially going to come. He was having a mild flare up with his back. And he was initially going to come. And then he sent a message on Tuesday. was basically like, no, I will not be there. I am going to the hospital. So he's out and I had to decide, do I want to just waste the money? Because I can't cancel now. It's impossible to cancel now. I either cancel, don't show up and I don't pay and I pay or I show up and I, you know, utilize the time. So I decided instead to go by myself. I thought, well, I got to finish this out if I want to keep

this thing. Because if not, you have to redo the whole class and I don't want to do that. I would never do that again. So this is sort of like a way in which to still keep it, even though I don't actually have to take the whole class again. And even though I'm never using it, it's just kind of this one thing that like, I already have the certification. So I don't want to like not have it in case somehow I need it in some time. I don't think I ever will. And I can't imagine ever using it. But I don't know. It's just a weird thing that my brain is like, well, don't waste it. Because now if you ever need it again, you got to do 16 hours. Even though I already know I'd never need it. I don't know, man. My brain's weird. But in any case,

I decided to go to this class the other day. And I wanted to tell you about the class I took because it was fucking crazy, man. It was just fucking crazy. So the fellow who I took the class a couple years ago, five years ago, he seemed really normal. He seemed like a normal guy and just a normal dude. The people who I took this class with were absolutely the craziest, like Republican, nutty, firearm owners I've ever run into. So I show up at the class in the morning. I go in and there's only two of us. There was only going to be three in the class anyway.

So it was going to be Tom, me, and some other guy, right? Well, Tom's not there. I walk in and this fella says, hey, you're either Tom or you're Cecil, which one are you? And I said, well, I'm Cecil. Tom is in the hospital. He will not be here today. And then we started talking a little bit about like, oh, it's sad. I'm sorry that your buddy's not feeling well, et cetera.

We talked for a minute. And then out of nowhere, this guy says, yeah, you know, I just had a friend who wound up losing somebody to suicide. And I thought, oh, man, that's terrible. And I said, oh, that's really bad. And he says, yeah, he was going through a hard time. And he got a hold of one of my friend's guns. And he died by suicide. And I thought, well, isn't that a reason not to maybe have guns?

Like, isn't that a reason that we should all just be like, hey, maybe we shouldn't have guns? That's probably not a great thing to have. But that was the start of the class. That was before even he said, okay, we're starting. He told me that somebody very recently near him died by suicide with a gun. So we start the class, and the class seems relatively normal initially. I didn't get a little a whiff of anything

strange at all until like maybe about 25 minutes into class. Now early on in the class he says essentially he points to one of the pieces of I don't know

it's not legislation but it's like sort of the rules around what he has to evaluate us on right? And the things he has to evaluate us on and essentially it comes down, it boils down to his judgment on whether or not you should or shouldn't have a concealed carry permit.

So basically, this guy, he gets to decide the whole process. There's no other person other than him in the room. And so if he looks at me and says, I don't think you should have one, then he can just say, I don't think you should have one. Now, I'm sure that there's some appeals process or I can take another class or however that works. But most of the time, you take the classes sort of butted up against your, expiration date. And so there's no, like, he's not giving you a lot of room to maybe fix that process if necessary.

So you're in this really, this in this bind where this guy is essentially, he's the one, he's the one who gets to decide whether or not you get to keep this. And you might be wasting your entire day there. So initially what pops in my head is, well, if this guy says some crazy shit, I can't be like, hey man, that's crazy. I've got to kind of just sit there. So we start the class, and essentially the first thing you do in the class is he says the ranges are going to open soon, so we should go shoot. So both of us go shoot.

It's no problem. Neither of us missed the target. You know, you hit the target 30 times. You go back into the room. It's a real simple shooting test. No big deal. We sit back down, and the first thing he does is he shows us a video. Now, the video that he shows us is for, I don't know what's called.

called Legal Shield or something. So imagine you're getting like a timeshare video and you're in a gun store, right? So you're in a gun store and you're sitting down and someone is showing you essentially a timeshare video trying to sell you something, right? And the thing he's trying to sell me is insurance in case I murder somebody with my gun, right? That's what he's trying to sell me. The thing he's trying to sell me is a monthly subscription cost that I pay to a legal shield something. I don't remember exactly what it was called.

Could even be Legal Shield. I don't know. This company is a bunch of lawyers. And if I wind up in a situation where I've murdered somebody or injured somebody with my concealed carry weapon, I can call them on the phone and they will send someone to be my lawyer.

Now, there's up subscription. So it's $30 a month for the, like, the bit most... I think it was 20 for the most basic. 25 for like the second upgrade where you get like bail, they'll bail you out for a certain amount. There's another one that like covers your personal injury and that one was like 40 bucks a month or something. But I can't imagine being in a position where I'm thinking, you know, it's a real, real definite a chance I'm going to use this thing. So I should probably get insurance in case I murder another human being. It was insanity. And he shows this, this video.

And now, if you know anything about concealed carry, conceal carry, when you conceal carry a weapon, there's like a couple of rules you should be thinking about. And one of the rules, one of the biggest things, right, is that you don't want to start a fight and you don't want to pull your gun and shoot somebody if it's not, if you are not in absolutely immediate threat that you cannot retreat from, right?

This isn't, it's, you know, we live in a state where we have Castle Dock during here. So I wouldn't be expected to retreat from my home. Like if someone were to come to my home, I wouldn't be expected to leave my home if somebody came in. But if I was anywhere else, I would be expected to try to remove myself from the situation. So when he came up and was like trying to fight with me or whatever, I shouldn't be like, well, come on then or whatever and then get into a fight, a fist fight or whatever. Maybe I'm losing and I pull my gun on and I shoot the guy. That wouldn't be a good use of concealed carry because I got into a fight with this guy. So it's not a great use of it.

You know, if I'm in a road rage situation, I get mad at somebody and I walk to their car and then we get into a fight. Like, I instigated that, right? So it's all bad. You shouldn't do that. And if I shot somebody after I instigated a road rage incident, I would imagine, even if I was defending myself,

they're kicking the shit out of me, that's still not justified in any way, shape, or form. I'll go to jail for that. So the first thing you learn is, even if you're going to carry, which I don't, right, if you're going to carry, don't fucking get involved in anything. Immediately remove yourself from the situation, right? So I'm watching this thing, and this guy comes on and he's going to give a testimonial.

And here's his testimony. Story is, he's some kind of food service person. I think he makes things they sell at a farmer's market. I think he sort of makes a food. Maybe it looks like a, it looked kind of like a coal slot they was making. or some sort of kimchi or something that he was making in a jar and he delivered it to different

farmers markets and businesses and stuff. So he got a concealed carry because he was going back and forth to Sacramento. I have no idea if Sacramento is dangerous. And he travels down there and he says,

I'm gonna, I hit my last delivery too late. So I decided to sleep in my car. He's got a van. so he pulls up in a parking lot, goes to sleep pretty early. Says he wakes, gets woken up in the middle of the night by someone banging on the side of his car or his van. He looks outside and they have a two by four with a nail in it. And they're hitting his vehicle and they're screaming.

They're whacking on the vehicle, whacking on the vehicle, whacking on the vehicle. Sounds like it happened multiple times. And then he says, if they come by the door again, I'm going to shoot him. And they came by the door again and he shot him. and then he called the police and the police came and they arrested him and the guy's obviously dead and then they take him in and he called this legal shield

or whatever and they like got him off essentially or they didn't we didn't get to the second part of the video right then but essentially the long and short of it is they got him off they wanted to come like talking to the police and he didn't have to worry about it and he's like super thankful or whatever but like you're in a car you got your keys you just put your keys

and you just drive away I realize somebody fucked your car up right but you pull away from that person and you call the police and the police come and then they figure out what happened and then like you go through your insurance to fix your car like that's how a normal person would do it i wouldn't think that you would be in such massive unescapable danger with a gun this is the guy they chose to give the testimonial is there no better example out there of someone who maybe was in danger at some point in the past is there no better example that they can find that they've disfended, this is the guy? This is the guy that they're like,

yeah, a guy hit my car twice with a weapon and then I murdered him. That's not an example, man. That's terrible. That's terrifying that we live in a country where that's the thing that can happen. This person's obviously having a mental health episode. Look, I don't think anybody should hit anybody else's car with a weapon, but I also don't think that person deserves to die for it. I think like somebody should show up and like control him and feel. it out and maybe put him in some sort of place where he can hopefully get better and not do those sorts of things. And then maybe whoever, if he's responsible, he should pay for your car or whatever, but somebody shouldn't die because of it. This is the story they told. That's how the

class starts. So we finish the video. It's like a two minute video. And then he says, somebody else is going to come in later. And obviously that person is the hard sell person who's going to sell us this insurance. He doesn't say that that's going to happen. But he's basically like, oh, we're going to be visited by the agent who, you know, make sure that this insurance is available to all of us or whatever. And then he starts teaching the class and he says, hey, I have this, I'm going to show you a bunch of slides. And on some of these slides, you're essentially going to just ask,

why is that the case? And I'm just going to say, well, that's just the case in Illinois. Because Illinois is stupid. And it's an awful state. And I hate this state. And we have stupid leaders. And you could tell already that he's already. like this crazy Republican.

And the person who's sitting across the way from me, also 100% in agreement. I'm just silent. I'm like, okay, whatever. These guys are idiots. I don't need to engage with them. And I can't really engage with the teacher. If I do, then I waste out my money that I paid.

So I'm sitting there just taking all this dumb abuse because they're just shitting on anybody who isn't exactly like them, right? So he starts talking about how Democrats are a fungus and how they're going to, they just leach out of the city. The city is the reason why we have all this crime It's because of the Democrats. But like I live in an affluent suburb of Chicago.

The crime rate in my suburb and the surrounding suburbs is ridiculously low. It's like there's no crime. I mean, is there a crime on occasion? I'm sure somebody's car gets broken into once in a while. Maybe somebody has a fist fight with somebody. There might be some domestic violence happening. But you don't have to walk around looking. over your shoulder because you're in constant danger, it's an affluent suburb.

Every suburb near me is an affluent suburb. You would have to go 25 miles towards Chicago in order to hit suburbs where it might be a little more dangerous, a little more dangerous, right? Not even really dangerous at all, but a little more dangerous it would be in some of the some of the suburbs closer to Chicago or in portions of Chicago. be even more dangerous, right? But it's not like out here. What are you talking about? It's not dangerous at all. So he starts talking about how Democrats are a fungus and how this is, you know, there's this, there's this sort of, uh, this that our leadership should go. One of the guys even

says, well, the fellow who's attending the class says, well, we might do it in two years. And I'm thinking in two years, we might not even have an America in two years. What are you talking about? They seem to think that we're going to, that everything is going to flip around and that the United States is going to be completely Republican and all the same. states will be Republican, I guess, by then. So at a certain point, he's complaining about almost every law that he mentions.

Not allowed to carry it on a on, you're not allowed to conceal carry in our state on public transportation. You're not allowed to do that. We don't let people do that. Other states allow it. And he's complaining about how that's a horrible thing. And I'm thinking,

no, it's kind of a great thing. I wouldn't want you on my public transportation. Because I wouldn't trust you with a gun. I wouldn't trust you at all. This guy was a former law enforcement officer, and he also said he was Secret Service, too, and a couple other things. So he's got a resume that says, like, he's fine to carry a gun. At a certain point, he's talking about waiting periods. So in our state, we have a waiting period. I guess in other states, they don't have, they might not have a waiting period at all. I had always thought that waiting period was

federal, but I guess it isn't. It's a state law. In our state, you have to wait a it's 72 hours. So if I want to go buy a gun from a gun store or a personal, another person, technically I'm supposed to wait three days. I go to you and I say, I have intent to purchase this gun. And then they say, cool, let me run a background check. And then they run a background check on me. And then the background check comes up clear. They say, great, you can pick it up and pay me in three days. And then I go away for three days and I come back and I pick it up. Now, that's specifically made so that you don't have to go, so that if you are in a argument with somebody, you can't just be like,

well, I'll be back in 10 minutes. And then you run over to the gun store, you buy a gun, and then you shoot them. Or you're stewing and you have this thought on what you want to do and you think, I want to use this gun to harm somebody, and then you go to a place and you buy it and you have access to it right away. It's called the cooling off period so that like when you're angry enough to buy the gun, it might be that three days go by and you think,

well, I've cooled off enough. I'm not actually as angry as I've, was and maybe you won't go through with some sort of dire plan that you had planned when you purchased the gun. It doesn't seem like it's that onerous. What's the big deal? The difference is that I get the gun three days later. I don't understand what the problem is, right?

If I call Comcast and I don't have internet at my house and I say, hey, Comcast, will you come over and install internet? They don't say, they don't say, well, we'll be there in 10 seconds, Cecil. They're like, yeah, we'll put you on the schedule and you'll get it eventually. Right. That's how sometimes how things work, right? You just don't get it immediately. Now, with Comcast, I might wait a really long time. But you understand what I mean, right? I'm not going to, I don't necessarily have instant gratification when it comes to many things in my life. Now, there's some things, obviously. I could go to the store and buy certain electronic goods or other

things. But when it comes to buying a gun, there's some modicum of caution that they have. They say, hey, you know what? Maybe you shouldn't have that gun. Maybe you shouldn't have that gun right away. We should put some sort of barrier in there so that you don't do something stupid. It's not that onerous by a gun. You wait a couple days and you go back for it. What's the big deal? Well, this guy starts complaining.

He says, well, I'm a secret service agent or it was a secret service agent. I'm a law enforcement officer. Why should I have to wait those times? Well, the reason why you have to wait those times is because laws aren't bespoke, dude. You don't get your own laws. You don't get to just because you're more qualified

by other people, you get different laws than other people. That's not how this works. If that was a case, then why wouldn't we just allow somebody who races cars for a living? Let's say, so you're a NASCAR driver. You don't get a speed limit then, right? You're a really good driver. You know how to drive at high speeds. You know, when other people are driving, you're probably a good defensive driver.

If you're, you know, drive things at high speeds, you probably have great reaction time. Why should I limit you for the speeds that you do? if you can obviously handle literally any speed on the road, it wouldn't bother you at all to drive as fast as possible anywhere you'd want to go, you should be immune to speed limits. Well, that's stupid. And the reason why it's stupid is because that's not how laws work. Laws are like the lowest common denominator.

We would expect the person with the least amount ability to be able to follow these laws. The law isn't necessarily there for him. He's not going to, hopefully not going to shoot someplace up. he's not going to like go buy a gun in anger. So instead what he's what he has to do, he's complaining that he has to wait because he's super qualified.

Well, that's not how laws work, man. That's just not how it works. And you were a law enforcement officer. So you should know how laws work. Instead you're going to complain about it and then you're going to blame our state for specifically creating a situation that makes you wait a little longer.

So at this point, the legal shield representative comes back in the room. and this is a lady, and she comes in, and she immediately wants us to take our phones out and scan something on the screen. So the guy and I, we don't take our phones out. We're just like sitting there. And she starts talking to us,

and she says it like three times. She's like, so you can scan that thing. So you can scan it on the screen, so you can scan it on the screen. So it's starting to get awkward. And I'm just like, I'm just going to fucking scan it. So I scan the thing. And it basically brings up their, their pricing structure, right?

So that's what comes up is you scan the thing and their pricing structure comes up. So that's how I know how much each one of these policies cost, right? The other guy never takes his fucking phone out. So kudos to him. He was better at

just not caring about the confrontation that he was going to get into than I was. Because I was just thinking to myself the whole time. I'm like, man, I just don't want to waste my day.

But in any case, the guy, I pull my phone out and she's like, okay, so now you can select what plan you want. I'm like, I'm not selecting a plan. I'm never carrying my gun. I'm like, why would I select the plan? So she literally tries to sell us a timeshare.

She's just talking about how great this thing is. She explains that that legal shield will protect you, this legal shield company will protect you, even if you just murder them with like a pencil or whatever. So she's talking about how her son is this big, huge, tough guy. And this big, huge tough guy, he could beat somebody to death and legal shield would, he's a, he's a, a lethal weapon is what she said. She said, my son is a lethal weapon. He could, he's not in the movie lethal weapon,

but he's, he's like a secondary lethal weapon. And he can go ahead and, uh, he could get protection from legal shield. Even though he doesn't carry a gun, he has one of these accounts, because he's so tough. He's such a tough guy. Uh, anyway, uh, she talks for like 20 minutes trying to tell us about how great this company is. We watch the second half of the video. We find out this. This guy doesn't, you know, he murdered somebody, he gets away with it, essentially. But in any case, he is, you can just buy this stuff if you want. We're not interested. Neither of us are interested.

Both of us are just stone face sitting there. Neither of us are going to buy her insurance or whatever. We don't need it. So she leaves eventually. She finally packs up. And during the time, she was kind of talking about how she sometimes brings in treats for people. I guess she tries to sell people stuff because she brings it treats

she goes out to the store, buys a bunch of stuff and then she brings you cookies and then you feel like well shit, I got a cookie from her so I might as well sign up for Legal Shield or whatever. And before she leaves, she has this comment. She says, we just dealt with our first carjacking

and the person got off. And evidently, the way the story goes is that this person was in a road rage incident. She started to call it a carjacking and then she changed it to road rage. So it started out as a carjacking. She's like, oh, we had a carjacking. I mean road rage incident.

So not a carjacking. A couple of guys got into a fight outside of their car in a road rage incident. And so what happens is, evidently, somebody got into, and this guy evidently got the shit kicked out of him. She says broken jaw, broken ribs, et cetera, et cetera.

Gets the shit kicked out of him. And then I guess the guy who kicked the shit out of him was coming in again for one last time to beat him up after he had already really kicked the shit out of him. And this guy pulled the gun out and shot him dead. I don't know. That sounds like a story you tell to other people.

It sounds like this guy got the worst end of a stick on a fisticoff's fight and had a gun on him and decided to shoot him. I don't even know why you get out of your car. If there's a road rage incident, it seems like a stupid idea to me. I'd just stay in my car and then just drive away and get their license plate. All those things seem real simple to get. and you should be okay. I mean, unless you're stuck on like the interstate and you can't move anywhere. But I figure most road rage incidences, you know, you should be able to at least maneuver

your car around someone else and get away from them. But instead, this guy gets into a fistikovs, gets beat up and shoot somebody. And they just got him off. So, hey, if you want to be this guy, if you want to shoot somebody dead, don't you worry. We got you covered. So after she tells a carjacking story and she can't, she can't, like, get a sales out of us, she decides to leave. Then the class sort of turns and the person starts talking about how crime is out of

control around us. They're like, the crime is rampant. It's everywhere. It's getting worse and worse by the year. Even though there's no statistics whatsoever that show that this is the case at all, this is the story they're trying to sell you. So I, the long and short of it is, every chance that this guy had, he wound up needling the Democrats, and not just needling, but like outright insulting the Democrats. At a certain point, he's trying to tell a story about how, well, who do you think has more sense in this, in our, in our state?

And he's one of these guys who asks like really, like all kinds of questions. He thinks that the way, like pedagogy requires questions, right? So his way to teach is I'm just going to ask a bunch of questions. And I'll just look out and I'll just ask a question and then I'll just ask people to answer. Well, that's not a great way to do it because neither of us are familiar with the material. The material is he's showing, he's literally showing us for the first time. And neither of us are like, unless you study this stuff, I mean, what would you know? Like you know kind of the basics on whether or not you're allowed to shoot somebody if you have this gun.

And everybody should know those things. The rest of the stuff is all just really simple stuff. It's all just like rule stuff that, you know, it's nice to get a refresher on and I'll remember it for the next five years. And when it turns around next time, I'll get a new set of information. But the information is all real simple, like where you shouldn't carry a gun. One point, he's complaining about all these places that you can't carry a gun. And they all seem really reasonable, right? I can't carry a gun to a hospital or a public library or a school or a place where they serve alcohol or a public gathering.

Like all those seems to, I guess it seems like great places not to have a gun or not to be afraid that someone else has a gun there. Right? It feels like amazing places that Illinois has decided you can't carry a gun. And also any single owner can basically say you shouldn't carry a gun here. But then he's telling us, well, hey, you know, if the sign isn't perfect. If the sign isn't exactly how this sign is with this particular thing and this is the rotation of the sign, this is a circle size, it da-da-da-da-da-da, then you can carry there. But if they catch you and they tell you to leave, you got to leave.

And I'm just like, what the fuck is that? Like, I don't want to go in a store where it says no guns on it and be like, well, that sign isn't up to spec. So I'm okay. It's like a misdemeanor if the sign is up to spec. And they can also take away my right to carry if I do that. He's telling people he's like, yeah, if the sign isn't right, they technically can't tell you, but you know, you probably shouldn't go in there because they can trespass you.

And I'm like, that's terrible advice. You should just look at any place that's, says you shouldn't carry a gun and not carry there because it's a business. Like, what are we doing? So I'm talking about how crimes ramping up. And he also mentions how people down south have a lot more sense than people up north. And I'll tell you how I know this. Because if you go up and down one of the major streets by here every couple weekends,

you see all these idiots out there, all these sheep with their no kings. And then he does like a little no kings walk where he's like walking with a sign. No kings. no kings. It was really unbearable. It was awful. Really funny, too, at some points. At the end of the day, I wound up getting my certificate.

And when I do get my concealed carry, I will leave a review for this place. Because this place, this is essentially an infomercial, right? It's not like, what did I get out of it? I mean, all the rest of it is like, I knew all the stuff. I knew I shouldn't carry a gun in most of those places. I knew I shouldn't carry a gun where people. don't want me carry a gun. I knew the rest of the laws mostly because they're all real common sense laws. Nothing in there is that shocking. So I don't know. The only reason I'm doing this

is because it's a barrier to entry so that people who aren't affluent can't do it, right? The reason why they do this is so that if you have, if you pay money for it, then they want you to do it. But if you're not affluent, if you don't have enough money to disposable income to suspend, then you can't conceal carry. And that's, I think, think by purpose. There's a reason why they do that. At a certain point, too, this woman who left earlier, after she didn't get any sales, came back in with bagels and muffins. I think is the last ditch effort to try to sell us a, try to sell us this insurance and neither of us bought, and neither was took a bagel either. I didn't want to feel indebted to her in any way. So she left

without, without, she's like, anybody want a bagel? I brought bagels. We're like, no, we're good. And then she left and had to give away bagels. So I think she, that was money. She threw away there just for being nice instead of actually getting a sale. But, but yeah, it's one of the, like, this is one of those moments that you do this sort of thing and you realize, I just never realized that there was this. I always thought to myself, like, I know that there's a lot of people who are red out there, obviously. And sometimes you put yourself in situations when you meet those people. I don't see a lot of those people.

And most of the time when I run into them, I don't try to interact with them. I don't want to have a conversation with them. But they're kind of all over. And it's funny how insidious all their talking points are and how that dumbs their brain down. It's funny how insidious, everything that gets mentioned on Fox News

winds up in this guy's brain and this guy just repeats it out to the world. I'm going to leave a review once I get my actual card in the mail, which I don't know how long that takes could take several weeks. I'm going to leave an actual review that basically says, like, left, people on the left own guns too, man. You're alienating me.

I'll never go back there again. It's one of the closest places to my house, and I'll never go back again. Why would I go back again? I'm not going to go back and give money to this establishment. Why would I do that? Like, we're not politically aligned. And they could just shut the fuck up and I'd never know,

or I'd least suspect, but not have hard proof, right? those would be my options. Instead, now I fucking know. And why would I bother? So I went online to look for very specifically. I was like, well, I'm going to fucking go try to find the best place to go shoot. Because I do like to go target shoot and I like to trap shoot. I like the activity.

I think it's fun. And so I went to go look to see if there was any ranges that actually, I mean, I don't believe that there's probably a lot of. like leftist ranges out there, but at least ones that are welcoming to people that aren't fucking MAGA Republicans. And I found a couple that are nearby. They're farther away twice, three times as long to get to, but I'll just drive there. Like I, you just lost my business. I was going to come in and be a person who's going to sort of frequent your establishment. And now I'm like, never going to go back. I'll literally never step back in that store again.

And I'm going to leave them a shitty review and I'm going to let other people who are on the left know that you're not welcome there. Like, you're not welcome at this. this place. This isn't a place where other people that think like I do would feel welcome in that class. Like, just shut the fuck up, man. Just teach the fucking class. You got problems with the laws? Great. Start a fucking interest group, man. Go form some fucking, like, some community group that petitions lawmakers to try to change the laws, if that's what you like. But don't shit on other people because they're fucking more empathetic than you. That's, that's fucking terrible. That's stupid.

So anyway, I just wanted to relate that story. And I know I'm not going to be able to tell Tom because Tom's in the hospital, obviously. And when Tom comes back, there's going to be a million things to talk about. And that story is going to get pushed to the wayside. And I wanted to sort of just document it. I just wanted to put it out there so I don't forget it. Just like what we did with the other concealed carry.

So anyway, I'll be back next week in some capacity, whether it's with Tom or without Tom. And please, if you think about it and you want to send him a message, dissonance.podcast at gmail.com, you can reach out to him and send him a message. I'm sure he would be very appreciative if anybody sent him a message while he is in the hospital hoping to fix all the ills that are wrong with his back. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week. I'll be back next week. Hopefully, maybe Tom will be back next week. Who knows? But I'll be back next week. And I'm going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics crees. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babillon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized,

stereogram, pyramidal, free energy healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late night infoducatainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, Death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls,

Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers,

witches, wizards, vaccines, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak, stigmata,

nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands, bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in.

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